Yolanda is a smart person (MBA candidate and chemical engineer — I’m impressed) and since I got to do the social media work for TEDxSydney on the weekend, I now consider myself a real social media expert (yes, I’m that vain and deluded). So I’m offering free social media advice (hey, at least I’m not charging for it, I’m not that deluded… though I’d like to be…)
Here’s Yolanda’s question:
Feeling like a gen x, needing some social media lessons…
I have been following LinkedIn for 6 months, just got a facebook page two weeks ago (yes, hard to believe…when did I become a luddite…). Phase 1 – my neighbours and I produced a short film entry to the Origin Sustainability Drive competition, so proved that we could take an idea into reality (check it out on link). Phase 2 – We need at least 2000 votes for the $10K people’s choice award, but sitting at just 65. We have formed an alliance with the community not-for-profit Moreland Energy Foundation (we would donate half if we win). We have interviewed for an article that will appear in The AGE next week. But how do we use social media? It is much harder than I imagined!! (I am studying an MBA, so super keen to develop these new world skills!) Will appreciate your help and advice.
Post 2 in a series about my work as social media director for TEDxSydney.com, this one about how to do the actual work. Hope it helps you craft your own social media procedures.
Has someone already tweeted this?
We share official TEDxSydney Twitter and Facebook access and it would look dumb if we tweeted, say, a housekeeping announcement more than once. So, when tweeting/FBing from the official TEDxSydney account, check the tweet/FB stream on the profile page first to make sure your information hasn’t already been tweeted, and if you think it’s necessary, also check with other frequent users of the account first to make sure they haven’t already tweeted/FB’d it.
Personal account versus official TEDxSydney account
It’s fine to tweet or FB about TEDxSydney from your personal account — please do. But please remember to do it from your own perspective, not from TEDxSydney’s perspective. Similarly, when communicating from the official TEDxSydney account, try to remember to do so from the perspective of TEDxSydney, not your personal perspective. For example:
@bigyahu Just bumped into the most interesting artist while in the queue for coffee at TEDxSydney (personal perspective)
@TEDxSydney morning tea is now served in the foyer. One brownie per person, please! (TEDxSydney perspective)
Use your initials on Twitter
It might make TEDxSydney less like the impersonal, elitist organisation we’re sometimes accused of being if we inject a little personality into our tweeting, but as we all have different personalities, it will help if we also indicate who’s tweeting from the @TEDxSydney account. Use your initials, prefaced with a carat (“^AJ”) to indicate your identity.
However, being exciting, engaging and informative is more important than clarifying your identity, so if you need more characters from your tweet to get your point across, please omit your initials.
Use an URL shortener with tracking
Later we can come back and measure how many people clicked on the links we’ve tweeted/FB’d to our followers, so we can learn how to do this even better over time. But we can only measure this if you use an URL shortener with tracking built-in. Bit.ly is a great service for this.
This Saturday 28 May I’ll be Social Media Director for TEDxSydney, which is developing into one of the best-known TEDx events in the world. (How big is the TEDx movement? There are 12 TEDx events happening all around the world on 28 May!) With a small volunteer we’ll be using social media tools — primarily Twitter, Facebook, Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, Instagram — to help the organisers, speakers, venue audience and online audience connect, enrich their experience, and share.
TEDx is about sharing, so here’s some excerpts from the guidelines we’re using, which I’ll chunk up into several blog posts for easier digestion. Hope you find them useful when planning your own social media strategy.
Why are we using social media?
Extend and enrich our relationships with our community;
Encourage interaction and exchange between community members;
Lately, all my roads seem to lead not to Rome but to video; online streaming video, for education, business, advertising and starting-up web startups. The Universe is trying to tell me something. I’m spending a lot of time considering what makes a great product video — the sort of video that launches a new product on the homepage of a web business.
Such videos are hard to get right: they need to rapidly attract and hold your attention like a television commercial but that conflicts with their need to be informative, to address features as well as benefits. They need to give you a sense for the structure of the story they tell from the beginning, so you can decide whether you’ll watch the whole thing, without being so structured that the story navigation interrupts the story telling.
Seth Godin lists 20 reasons why people might want to spread your message. very few of them involve anything that traditional advertising offers its audience:
I spread your idea because it makes me feel generous.
…because I feel smart alerting others to what I discovered.
…because I care about the outcome and want you (the creator of the idea) to succeed.
…because I have no choice. Every time I use your product, I spread the idea (Hotmail, iPad, a tattoo).
…because there’s a financial benefit directly to me (Amazon affiliates, mlm).
See Seth’s 20 other reasons why ideas spread here.
Yesterday, Australian blogging consultant Alister Cameron published a list of the “Top 100 Most Influential Australians Talking Politics On Twitter“. Actually, it was two lists: one of people who’d been calculated to be influential during the recent Australian Federal elections (using the Twitter hashtag #ausvotes at the end of their tweets) and another of the most influential people taking part in the weekly Twitter audience for the ABC TV show, QandA (using the hashtag #qanda).
I'm 29th! Yay! I'm waiting by the letterbox for my certificate
The best part of this news is not that I was ranked 29th most influential person on the Federal election (that is as ephemeral a position — and comes with all the prestige and cachet — of being in the third car at the traffic lights).
The best news is that Alister didn’t do the number-crunching himself, he used Pulse of the Tweeters, a service built by a couple of US academics, which you and I and anyone else can use to determine the people on Twitter with the most influence on any topic which Twitter determines is ‘trending’ — being used by enough people to be considered an issue of the day.
More on the people who built Pulse of the Tweeters here but sadly not very much specific detail about how influence is determined, just some general outline about what’s important when determining influence on social networks.
Most services designed to measure influence on social networks generally have a small amount of information available for free about individual users, but rarely publish a list of users in a ranked table, preferring to save that for paying customers.
For instance, Klout shows an almost unintelligible dashboard of my influence score in detail (ooh, look, I’m a “Thought Leader”) but if I want to measure myself against other people, or find a list of the most influential people on a particular topic, I’ve got to pay and/or start finding a developer to connect to their API.
Never mind the data, look at the pretty colours
Unless you’re a Nestlé or Nike there’s little value in tracking your Twitter influence. That’s not to say is some value in being an influential Twitter user — in the past twelve months I’ve gained some valuable business leads, met fascinating new friends and been sent some wine, beer and books to review. Some of my friends have even received swish new HTC smartphones.
But for most of us, Twitter is not (and should not) be business. Our Twitter stream is some new mix of personal and professional, something we’d generate anyway in other media if Twitter didn’t exist. As I say on my own Twitter profile page, we should all try to tweet like nobody’s following. The real you is the best brand you have.
In that case, the best way to turn up on a Top 100 Influential Twitter Users list is accidentally, as a byproduct of your true passions. And the best way to leave it again is to continue expressing those true passions.
This week I was interviewed by Owen of the E-Marketing Insights Podcast. Listen in for a little background history of Doing Words, as well as my perspective on what happened in the early days internet content publishing, how the Web 1.0 bubble grew and burst, why social media has changed the content publishing industry irrevocably, the continuing democratisation of content, and which brands I believe are best-equipped to succeed in future content markets.
Surgeon-General’s Warning: I hadn’t taken my brevity medication before the interview so you may find I rattle on for quite some time.
You know what’s great about this podcast episode? It’s only episode four of a brand-new podcast. It was recorded on a portable digital recorder, in my car, and the total post-production probably took Owen only an hour, from importing, editing and through to hosting on Soundcloud.
Despite the market-dominating power of iTunes and News Corporation and Facebook, more unique new content is being published every year by the people who would have been considered “the audience” twenty years ago.
Check out Owen’s E-Marketing Insights podcast, it’s early days yet but shows great promise, and that’s the best kind of content there is.
alan jones (@bigyahu)
27/05/10 4:47 PM
Hey, sorry for the extra step but click the link and I’ll know you aren’t a bot. Please follow this link to validate your profile. http://truetwit.com/vy30301516 Thanks
alan jones (@bigyahu)
27/05/10 11:05 PM
Euw. That tweet felt just like an ad. #fail. Try not to do that again, yeah?
MobileMojo (@phonesandplans)
27/05/10 11:15 PM
Thanks for the tip . I’m new around here, still on the steeper side of the learning curve.
alan jones (@bigyahu)
27/05/10 11:20 PM
Great, that’s better already. On Twitter, be you, not your brand. Do the right thing by your brand, but be a person. Cheers!
MobileMojo (@phonesandplans)
27/05/10 11:34 PM
True. But you’ve got to admit its easier to hide behind the anonymity of a brand.
alan jones (@bigyahu)
27/05/10 11:46 PM
Might seem so but no. Twitter users more forgiving of people than brands. They love beating up on brands.
alan jones (@bigyahu)
27/05/10 11:49 PM
Twitter often medium for community revenge on brands and marketers. On Twitter the power rlnship btween brand and audience flips.
Why add polish when in today’s society, being so geeky is so credible? I love this intro video for Diaspora. Now it needs to be mashed-up into a music video for some yet-to-break indie band. Call it “OK Go Make A Social Network”.
The thought for today: when branding, be true to who you are. Customers have a seventh sense for these things.
If you use Twitter as part of your personal or company marketing, Frances over at Edublog asks interesting questions: when potential contacts are researching you on Twitter, will they judge you by the people who follow you? Should you therefore invest time in checking your follower lists and blocking the spammers, scammers and pornbots following you? Does it reflect poorly on you if they are there?
First, my usual word of warning: nobody really knows yet.
No matter how impressive the social media guru or digital strategy expert, this is still shortly-after-dawn in the Age of Social Media and nobody really knows anything for certain yet. Social Media was born as a means of subversive online communication — it only recently and reluctantly began to bend to the will of marketers. The industry is still developing the methodologies that will one day tell us for sure the answers to these big social media questions.
In the meantime (as Quasimodo said to the archdeacon) I have my hunches. Here they are.
Please don't judge him by his Twitter followers.
Relax, don’t do it
No, I don’t think a follower list full of spambots and pornbots reflects poorly on you. I don’t think you should prune your follower lists. I believe in most cases, people will not judge you by the calibre of people following you on Twitter.
If someone does judge you on the kinds of people who follow you on Twitter, it’ll vary greatly by age, industry and nationality. You won’t find the same standards applying in Paris as you do in Texas, or between tweens and seniors. Twitter is a very international community and there’s no easy way to track location or demographics of the people who view your Twitter profile unless they also choose to follow you.
So why worry about unmeasurable opinions of people you can’t identify?
There are more productive things you can be doing
For most of us, the investment required to curate our follower list will not equal whatever return we get from having a ‘clean’ follower list or the risk we take by not having a ‘clean’ follower list. (This may not be true for conservative politicians, church leaders and captains of industry.) I have 1,700 or so followers currently and I’m not even going to try to keep so many followers in line. The spambots and pornbots will eventually wither and die from neglect if Twitter’s own anti-abuse team don’t get to them first.
You won’t see me saying this often…
Let’s take a leaf from the pages of Old Media History. If you own a television set, TV networks can’t stop you watching their programming. There is no ‘block’ button on the control panel at your local TV station. Yet the demographic composition of a TV audience is essential to the success of a television when courting advertisers.
How do they change their audience composition? Through means much more subtle and yet even more effective than a ‘block follower’ button. They use programming changes to change the content being broadcast and when it is broadcast. And they use audience research to learn more about not just who their audience is, but what sort of content they need to offer in order to reach the audience they aspire to.
What is the Twitter equivalent of ‘programming changes’? Change what you say, change when you say it. Change what you reply to, and how rapidly you reply to it. Encourage interaction with the followers you aspire to have more of. Seek less interaction with pornbots. Respond less often to phishing scams. Please, for all our sakes!
‘Audience research’ on Twitter is not dissimilar to TV: time-consuming, inaccurate and prone to erroneous conclusions. But it’s still worth a try. Pick a follower who typifies your ideal audience. Take note of who they follow and what they reply to. Mimic. Repeat.
No undo
Remember, I’m making this up as I go along, based on what I observe every day and what I can find in my hunch bag, but here’s the big take-away: I am not a fan of the ‘block’ button. If you decide to block followers who your business contacts won’t approve of, what next? because there’s no ‘undo’.
What if you’ve just blocked someone still finding their way around social media etiquette the hard way? What if that person might have become a valuable business contact or customer if you’d just given them another chance? Even if you keep following them after blocking them to see if they turn over a new leaf, you’ve sent them a message: you don’t want them following you. It’s a small thing to not follow someone, but a very large thing to not let them follow you. There’s no undo.
No wonder TV sets don’t have a ‘block viewer’ button.
. I’m new around here, still on the steeper side of the learning curve.
